![]() ![]() Also, because it was the post-punk era, there were a lot of bands – like Scritti Politti, A Certain Ratio and Gang Of Four – who brought material in from other areas. Straight away that’s an example of me bringing in knowledge from outside of pop music, to inform how we write songs. Pat: “The Vikes was actually from a science fiction novel by John Brunner, and it’s an abbreviation of the word vicarious, meaning people enjoying other people’s pleasures. That was the first time we got together to write songs together.” We can write music but can you write some words?’ So Pat supplied the words for our first band The Vikes and we played Costello, Clash and Ian Dury & The Blockheads influenced punk music. Pat was three years older and an avid reader of English literature, so I approached him and said, ‘We can’t write words. G: “At that point, I was putting punk bands together at school in the late 70s – early 80s. ![]() How did you start making music together as brothers? The amount of pain I used to see on those kids’ faces!” G: “That was always my thing – just practicing – but when I got to school all of that was thrown out the window because my pals were all punk rockers! So then I had to pretend I couldn’t play! I couldn’t tell them I knew all the chords when they were struggling to form a B minor. How did you go from classical music to playing in a pop band? The Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow is the third best music college in the world now, and sometimes I go in and do some guest lectures and you realise that the practice ethos is all – you cannot even communicate with those kids unless you that level of ability.” A lot of the jazz musicians, that I’ve spent a lot of time working with, have that ethos. There’s something about being a musician, if you really enjoy practicing that’s the main hurdle to get over, and from a very young age it was installed in me: that practicing was fun. “I used to faithfully go there until I was 15 years old, so I managed to get all my grades, played a lot of Beethoven and a lot of Mozart, and that sort of stuff. That decision when I was eight years old was more fundamental to my career than I could ever imagine! One of the neighbours was a piano teacher and she was obviously touting for business and she met my mother at the local store and said, ‘Do any of your boys want to play piano?’ I was first down that morning and my mum asked me and I said yes. Greg: “We had a piano that was bequeathed to by my grandfather and it sat dormant since it was dumped in the spare room of the house. What was the Kane household like growing up, musically? ![]() Greg and Pat have continued to make music independently, and we caught up with them both as they prepared to release Pocketful Of Stones, their first album of original material since 2012… Later that decade they signed to the Scottish jazz and classical record label Linn Records for their 1996 album Jazz Not Jazz and 1999 album Next Move, but these two releases turned out to be the last for Hue And Cry before an amicable split. The duo took an experimental leap forward into the 90s, creating a number of LPs – Truth and Love, Showtime! and Piano & Voice – that infused jazz, drum ‘n’ bass, R&B and Nuyorican Latin-funk. To the delight and surprise of the Kane brothers, the band had been a commercial success, however Hue And Cry were dropped from their label after the release of their third album Stars Crash Down. Two massive hits followed from their second album Remote: Looking For Linda and Violently. Their debut album Seduced And Abandoned spawned their biggest hit Labour Of Love in 1987 ( read Hue And Cry wrote the song in our latest issue) after the first single I Refuse had failed to make the UK Top 75 the year before. North Lanarkshire-born siblings Greg and Pat Kane started making music together in 1983, when Pat was about to graduate from university and his brother was still at school. Hue And Cry’s Pat Kane: “That’s one of the basics of establishing the hook of a song: to have a great opening lyrical metaphor.” We hear both sides of the story behind the emergence of the 80s blue-eyed soul pop brothers from North LanarkshireĪlong with Wet Wet Wet, Simple Minds, Del Amitri and Deacon Blue, blue-eyed soul pop duo Hue And Cry were one of the most successful acts to emerge from the Scottish music scene that stormed the charts in the 80s. ![]()
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